About

So what is this website all about and who has made it? Unfortunately it is impossible to summarize this site in a few words, because it is a collection of various topics which are mostly unrelated. In general, this is a voluntary effort to make information available of which I think it could be useful or interesting (or funny). There is no strict goal and there are no obligations.

The first parts originated in 1997 and stuff has been added and updated ever since. Everything has been subdivided in a few categories. The first is “Educative”, which is general-purpose information mostly related to the internet, computers and digital media. “Hardware” is about everything that consists of physical parts, from electric guitars to electronics. “Software and Sound” is what the title says, downloadable stuff that can be either run on a computer or played on speakers. “Weird Stuff” is, well, weird stuff. Some people may want to avoid this section because it contains mostly absurd humour, some of which is potentially offensive. Finally, there are some links to other sites.

A complete overview of this site's contents can be found in the site map.

There is also a blog that accompanies this site, but aside from some short remarks about random stuff you won't find much there that is not covered in more detail on this very website.

This site is almost entirely written in HTML5 or HTML 4.01 strict, and every page has been validated. If something does not look right in your browser, or if something like an embedded object is missing even though the plug-in is installed, it is because your browser or plug-in is not standards-compliant.

If you are wondering why this site does not sport a spiffy and trendy design, it is because I only really care about the content. I do not want to waste my time on either updating the design every few months to follow the latest design fads, or fixing bugs contained within semi-auto-generated JavaScript and CSS garbage. That is why this site has a very spartan look. If it makes you feel uncomfortable, feel free to override the style with some fancy template.

This site is also available through HTTPS, but only because my provider started offering SSL for free and I could get a free certificate through Let's Encrypt. I cannot promise that the SSL certificate won't expire from time to time because I consider it low priority. I know there is a strong drive to convert the whole web to HTTPS but I don't really see the point for websites like this that contain only publicly available static content without any form of accounts or logins. The only justification would be to protect people who access the internet through crappy unreliable network infrastructure, from receiving man-in-the-middle-altered webpages with pop-ups and exploits. For the time being, I will keep the HTTP version of the site available.

After finishing my PhD, I continued to work as a researcher in the VISICS computer vision research group until May 2011.

I currently work as a senior software developer at eSATURNUS, the first company to offer a complete solution for the digital operating room.

Contact

If you want to contact me, you need to use the Mail page(it is the only way, you won't find any e-mail address on this site, the reason can be found in the informative section).

This site is entirely funded by revenues from ads. This is a hobby project and not intended to be a source of income. However, if you feel inclined to donate money e.g. as a thank-you for the software downloads or any of the articles, you can do this through either PayPal, or BitCoin. (When using PayPal, please do not donate below €1 or you'll only be sponsoring Paypal itself.) Keep in mind that I do not sell anything on this site, and donating any amount of money does not grant the donor any rights.

This website is hosted by 34SP.com. I can recommend them especially for their great and quick customer support. (If you sign up for hosting with them, enter “dr-lex.be” as a referral, both you and me will get one month of free hosting.)
DNS is handled by Stone Internet Services, which I also can recommend for their reliability and support.

Stuff I've Done

Yes, I know that is a bit of a silly title. Of course I won't be explaining here what I did today or what kind of petty crimes I committed as a child (if any). The idea of this section is to give a list of some of the more interesting things I have done and created in my life. Most of these items link to other parts of this site, where they are explained in detail.

ComicsThis was the first noteworthy thing I ever created. More specifically, I was eight years old when I started my first comic. Unfortunately my interest for computers and electronics became too large a competitor for the comics and I gradually stopped drawing them. Ironically, that was just at the moment when my drawing skills started to mature. This page explains the history of the comics, and includes one full comic plus comments.

MusicWhen I was a small kid, I think about the same time when I started working on the comics, I followed music lessons under the impulse of my parents. As far as I can remember I got as far as one year of piano lessons after some years of general music theory, and although I performed not poorly at all, I decided to quit. My next attempt at something musical was much later, around 1995. I decided to have a try at electronic music. At that time, the ‘MOD’ format was quite popular and I got my hands on a program to make MOD songs with up to 32 channels. I ended up making a whole bunch of songs, all of them quite different, and some of them pretty awful. In the end however I did make some decent songs, but lack of time and problems with the software gradually made an end to this project in 1998. You can hear some samples and a few complete songs on the music page.

ArtIn parallel with highschool, I went to art academy at “De Lei” in Leuven. This was also under impulse of my parents, but it had a much better survival chance than the earlier music lessons (it was in the same building which had been renovated in the meantime). I was older to start with so I could muster up more motivation, and I had a larger affinity for messing around with pencils, paint and other stuff than for learning music theory. The lessons featured varying themes and practically all styles from simple pencil drawings to sculpting and etching. I had a good time there, but I did not pursue any career in arts afterwards.

WritingI even had a shot at writing a story when I was 14 years old. You can find this story in the Random Archive (it is of course in Dutch only and no, I am not going to translate it). It is about a boy who moves to a huge mansion which appears to be haunted. Of course all kinds of strange things start happening, eventually leading to a spectacular climax. Any references to existing stories at that time had probably seeped through movies and computer games, because I had not read any similar stories at that time. Understandably for something written by a 14-year old, the story got a lukewarm reception at best, so I didn't bother trying to write another. Except maybe the infamous ‘G. Thirion’ slasher stories which can be found in the Weird Stuff section…

Building electric guitarsSome day when I was about 17 years old, I wanted to have an electric guitar. But, those proved to be quite expensive and I reckoned my parents wouldn't want to buy me one, after my not-so-successful journey into music. So I went for my own solution: I built my own! I first created an unsightly prototype which was basically a long thin piece of wood with strings, a fretboard (which initially had totally wrong dimensions) and some experimental pick-up designs. After collecting information about common dimensions of real guitar parts, I started working on the real thing. The sad truth is that I have little time to play the two guitars I have built.

Building speaker cabinetsMy first experiment with speakers was when I was still a kid and it involved a shoe box and a tiny speaker from a tape recorder. I noticed that when placing the speaker over a hole in the box, the sound quality improved. When a friend gave me some car speakers I upgraded the shoe box idea by making ‘cabinets’ out of much thicker cardboard, which of course still was not quite it. The next iteration consisted of the same speakers in wooden boxes, which were modified multiple times until their limits were reached. After this, I started using MDF and proper design rules with ever improving results.

ElectronicsAside from the few times I blew fuses in the house by mistreating some appliances, my first contact with electronics was an experimenting kit. It was the kind of large board with components that could be connected by sticking wires underneath springs. Later on, I learned to solder by buying some Velleman kits (hint if you want to try this yourself: do not start with the equaliser like I did). I was soon able to repair all the appliances I destroyed as a kid and other things. Eventually I started to design my own circuits, and created my own PCBs.

Building a custom PC case from scratchIf you didn't get the point by now, I like to build stuff myself. The same happened when some day I wanted a new PC. Most people just buy a ready-made PC, and some will go as far as buying the empty case and parts and assemble them. I went even further by also designing the case from scratch, giving it an unusual shape and lay-out. I also hacked a GPU cooler to fit on a graphics card for which it wasn't designed. For any future PCs I will most likely just go the ‘assemble from readymade components’ way, but this was certainly a fun experiment and the PC has worked perfectly during its entire lifetime.

Making websitesOf course, I made the site you're now looking at — duh. This could be considered the fourth version of this site. I have made some other sites in the past, most of which have been taken down by now. Read more about this and other websites' histories in the “site dump”.

Programming various stuff in various languagesSome people may find this hard to believe, but I initially hated computers. In 1989, before my dad bought a Macintosh SE/30, I only knew DOS PCs with their uninviting black screen and arcane prompt commands1 one had to learn by heart. But the Mac proved to be a much ‘friendlier’ machine, and at that time HyperCard was preinstalled. HyperTalk, HyperCard's easy-to-learn scripting language, introduced me into the world of programming. It would take a while until I learned other languages but nowadays I mostly program stuff in C, C++, Perl, Python, and of course the occasional JavaScript on this site. I also have limited experience with Java, and I have had courses in Scheme and Prolog, but my knowledge of those two is extremely rusty.
(1: By the way, these days I use the command prompt more often than GUIs…)

SportsAhem, just kidding. I will admit it, I am rather unsportive and that is an understatement. As a kid I was dragged along between various sports by my parents, in search of a sport that I would like, to no avail. Eventually they gave up. Swimming and biking are about the only things that I might do spontaneously for another reason than pure necessity. And you may have guessed it: I did not buy a ready-made bicycle either, but hacked one together from various parts…

PhDAfter my Master in Electrotechnical Engineering and an additional Master in Artificial Intelligence at the K.U. Leuven, I started a PhD in the VISICS Computer Vision lab under supervision of Luc Van Gool. The PhD is about recognizing object classes whose instances are visually similar, like cars, cows, wheelchairs… I got my PhD degree at the end of 2009, and continued to work on the same subject as a researcher until May 2011. You can find publications related to my PhD on the publications page.

Guestbook

Just as one was supposed to have a ‘blog’ at the time of this writing, oldskool websites from around 1997 were supposed to have a guestbook and so did mine. Although that guestbook had survived each previous update of the website's design, I considered dropping it during the upgrade to this fourth iteration in 2009. Most of the entries that had been posted the years before were spam messages and pranks from former school buddies. Yet, the occasional worthwhile entry made me keep the guestbook, although I disabled automatic updating. You can still send a message (go ahead, Debaene, Kooken & co.) but there is no guarantee that it will be added. Do not use this to send mail, use the mail page instead.

Copyright & Stuff

All webpages and graphics (except a few, like most of the Random archive) are made by me, so it is in theory illegal to include my images or movies in your own site without my permission. In practice I have no objections if you want to use parts of my site, except if it would seem as if you were the author of any content created by me. I will be eager to grant you permission to use a part of this site, just mail me and tell me what you want. If that's too much asked, you may copy an image or movie, at the condition that it is clearly accompanied by a note saying it was “made by Dr. Lex”, and includes a clearly visible link to this site. For instance, you can combine the note and link with the following HTML code:Made by <A href="https://www.dr-lex.be/">Dr. Lex</A>

WARNING! Do not hotlink! Hotlinking means: directly using the URL of an image or movie on this site on your own site/blog/whatever. This site has limited bandwidth and nothing pisses me off more than discovering that I pay for someone else's traffic. Do not be so naive to think I won't see it: the more traffic you cause, the faster the hotlink will show up in my logs. I can replace a hotlinked image at any time with something really disgusting. So, please copy any images to your own webspace, but keep the above paragraph in mind.

If you want to link to a software download on my site: link to the download page, not the file itself. Many files (.sit, .tgz, .zip, …) will produce a ‘403 forbidden’ error if they are not linked from within this very site! If you use a browser that leaves the ‘HTTP referrer’ blank or replaces it by something fancy, you may also get 403 errors when downloading certain files. I had to enforce that the referrer is from this domain due to filthy crawlers that ignore robots.txt.

You may get temporarily locked out of the site when trying to use download accelerators. I do not actively block them, but some of them behave exactly like misbehaving web crawlers, which are actively blocked. If this happens, it is most likely because your download accelerator is more crappy than average and violates certain standards. Nobody should be using those things anyway. They do not accelerate anything except in very rare circumstances, and most of them are merely vehicles to install all kinds of malware.